The exterior of this modern church is rapidly weathering, and the over-rich carving of it is being rigorously searched by rains, frosts and thaws. It will be better for sloughing off these florid adornments.
CHAPTER XIII
Shakespeare the countryman.
We have abundant evidence of Shakespeare the countryman in his works, and of the Warwickshire man some evidences, too. In the splendid speech of the Duke of Burgundy, in Henry the Fifth, he makes the Frenchman talk with an appreciation of agricultural disaster which only an English farmer, and a Warwickshire or Gloucestershire farmer, too, could show. In the miseries of France, worsted by war, the Duke speaks thus—
“Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unprunèd dies: her hedges even-pleach’d,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disorder’d twigs: her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory,
Doth root upon; while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery:
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness; and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.”
Bacon would not have made a Frenchman speak with so English a tongue, in the way of the Midlands, nor could he if he would, for he knew no more than the real Burgundy could have known, those details of agricultural life; and he certainly could not have identified a “kecksie,” or a “keck,” as the Warwickshire children still call the hemlock, of whose dried stems they make whistles.
“Easy it is of a cut loaf to steal a shive, we know,” says Demetrius, in Titus Andronicus. That ancient Roman is made to talk like any Warwickshire agricultural labourer who takes his lunch in the hedgerow, off a “shive o’ bread, a bit o’ cheese or baacon and a drap o’ summit; maybe a tot o’ cider or maybe a mug of ale.” After which he will “shog off” to work again; using in that local word “shog” the expression Shakespeare places in the mouth of Nym, in Henry the Fifth. At the close of the day he will be “forewearied,” as King John describes himself.
In his plays Shakespeare follows the year all round the calendar and touches every season with magic. You feel convinced, from the sympathy, the joyousness, and the intimate touches, of his country scenes that he was a rustic at heart, and that he must have longed, during those many years when he was winning success in London, to return not only to his native place—to which the heart of every one turns fondly—but to the meadows, the cornfields, the hills and dales and the wild flowers around the town of Stratford-on-Avon. There again, when spring was come, to hear “the sweet bird’s note,” whether it were “the throstle with his note so true,” “the ousel cock so black of hue, with orange tawny bill,” “the wren with little quill;”
“The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo gray,”
or better still the mad joyous outbursts of the skylarks’ songs (“And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks”) in those wide horizons in May: these, you are certain, were Shakespeare’s ideals.